The Two Ways: The Early Christian Vision of Discipleship from the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas

Summary

How did earliest Christians receive and understand the teaching of Jesus and the apostles? These writings, among the earliest used in training new disciples, show a clear, vibrant, practical faith concerned with all aspects of discipleship in daily life—vocation, morality, family life, social justice, the sacraments, prophesy, citizenship, and leadership.

For the most part, these writings have remained buried in academia, analyzed by scholars but seldom used for building up the church community. Now, at a time when Christians of every persuasion are seeking clarity by returning to the roots of their faith, these simple, direct teachings shed light on what it means to be a follower of Christ in any time or place.

The Didache, an anonymous work composed in the late first century AD, was lost for centuries before being rediscovered in 1873. The Shepherd was written by a former slave named Hermas in the second century AD or possibly even earlier.

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The Two Ways - Rowan Williams

Shepherd

PREFACE

How did the early Christians receive and understand the teachings of Jesus and the apostles? The writings of these believers reveal a vibrant way of discipleship concerned with all aspects of daily life: family, vocation, morality, justice, religious practice, citizenship, and leadership.

Yet despite their immediacy, these writings have for the most part remained buried in scholarly tomes, analyzed by academics but seldom used for building up the church community. Now, at a time when Christians of every persuasion are seeking clarity by returning to the roots of their faith, these simple, direct teachings can shed light on what it means to be a follower of Christ in any time or place.

This little book includes two of the earliest Christian writings outside of the New Testament: the complete text of The Didache, also known as The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, and excerpts from The Shepherd of Hermas, in which the angel of repentance appears to Hermas, a Christian living in Rome, in the form of a shepherd. Both works were included in early lists of canonical books. They have been included here for their witness to the singular and demanding way of Jesus, reinforcing and amplifying his Sermon on the Mount with their insistence on a repentance that affects every corner of our lives.

The Didache, an anonymous work composed in the late first century AD, was lost for centuries. In 1873 Philotheos Bryennios, the metropolitan of Nicomedia, rediscovered it in an eleventh-century Greek codex at Constantinople.

The Shepherd of Hermas was written in the second century AD or possibly even earlier. The selections included here loosely follow those made by Eberhard Arnold in his 1926 omnibus of early Christian texts, which is available in English as The Early Christians: In Their Own Words. For Arnold, these texts were formative; they spurred him and others to start living in community after the example of these first Christians. Arnold writes: For my own life, a clearly defined way of life and faith arises from the early Christian witness. In spite of rigidity in later centuries and changes which affected Christianity then, this way continues to be a living force today. It comes from the wellspring of living truth.

In the following introduction, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, echoes Arnold, showing how unconventional and uncompromising the Christian way was in Roman times, and what it will take for Christians to reclaim this witness today: There is all the more need for communities of believers trying to live out the radical imperatives.… We can’t do any of this as isolated individuals with an interior piety. We need the concrete reality of Christ’s corporate Body.

The English translations of the Greek are by Michael W. Holmes, a preeminent scholar of early Christianity, based on the earlier work of J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer. Those wishing to study these writings more closely – along with other significant documents of this period, notably those of Clement of Rome and Ignatius – should read Holmes’s The Apostolic Fathers, third edition.

Veery Huleatt

Editor

INTRODUCTION

Rowan Williams

Most of the writings that survive from the first three centuries of Christianity are what one twentieth-century scholar of religion called death-cell philosophy; that is, they represent the kind of thinking that is done under extreme pressure, when what you say or think has a genuine life-or-death importance. Gregory Dix, an Anglican monk writing eighty or so years ago about the worship of the early church, imagined what it would be like to attend the Lord’s Supper in second-century Rome by recreating the experience in terms of twentieth-century London. He takes the descriptions of worship from texts like the so-called Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,The Didache, probably the most ancient account of worship outside the New Testament, and the Apostolic Tradition from the third century, and translates them into the landscape of modern England. A grocer from the unfashionable suburbs slips through the back door of a wealthy brother’s house in Kensington at the crack of dawn to share in the breaking of bread in the drawing room – a brief, quiet event, overshadowed by the knowledge that if they would be discovered they would face at least penal servitude for life, and very likely worse. Any Christian in this period knew that, even if things were relatively peaceful, it was always possible that a suspicious government would crack down. Dix describes how the deacons, the ministers who looked after the doors, were charged with scrutinizing everyone who came in very carefully; you’d need to know who your companions were if your life depended on them.

The suspicions were well-founded in one sense. If you look at the eyewitness accounts of martyrdom in these early centuries – documents like the wonderful record of the martyrs of Scilli in North Africa in AD 180 – you can see what the real issue was. These Christians, most of them probably domestic slaves, had to explain to the magistrate that they were quite happy to pray for the imperial state, and even to pay taxes, but that they could not grant the state their absolute allegiance. They had another loyalty – which did not mean that they wished to overthrow the administration, but that they would not comply with the state’s demands in certain respects. They would not worship the emperor, and, as we know from some other texts, refused to serve in the Roman army. They asked from the state what had been very reluctantly conceded to the Jews as an ethnic group – exemption from the religious requirements of the empire. What made their demand new and shocking was that it was not made on the basis of ethnic identity, but on the bare fact of conviction and conscience. For the first time in human history, individuals claimed the liberty to define the limits of their political loyalty, and to test that loyalty by spiritual and ethical standards.

That is why the early Christian movement was so threatening – and so simply baffling – to the Roman authorities. It was not revolutionary in the sense that it was trying to change